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Gay Afghan man speaks out on deep cultural taboo

Hamid Zaher fled Afghanistan to escape the misery of his personal life. His book details his anguished years as a closeted gay Afghan man

Hamid Zaher says his family has disowned him. He hopes his book will force Afghans to acknowledge homosexuality exists in the country. (Colin McConnell / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Jane Armstrongspecial to the star

Sun., March 17, 2013

As a little boy in Kabul, Hamid Zaher steered clear of boys his own age. They were too rough and made fun of his soft voice. He preferred to play hide-and-seek with the girls.

By age 15, Zaher’s interest shifted to men, but there was no word in Farsi to explain his attraction to the half-clothed men he’d stare at in public baths and swimming holes.

“I wondered why I was upside down,” Zaher, 38, said. “At first I thought it might be temporary. I thought that after one or three years, my orientation will change like other people and I will become interested in girls.”

That never happened. In 2001, just before the Sept. 11 attacks, Zaher fled Afghanistan, not because of the oppressive Taliban, but to escape the misery of his personal life. Eight years later, and from the safety of Canada, Zaher wrote a book detailing his anguished years as a closeted gay Afghan man.

He said he’s among the first openly gay Afghan-born men to speak out. Back home, homosexuality is not only a crime, but also a deep cultural taboo that’s hardly ever discussed publicly.

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“No one can dare say they are gay,” Zaher said. “They are 100 per cent suppressed . . . even those who come to foreign countries.”

The price for disclosure was steep. His entire family disowned him. An older brother in Europe told him he was crazy and urged him to see a doctor. A cousin in Hamilton, Ont., sobbed. Zaher said his relatives would kill him if he ever returned to Afghanistan.

Today, Zaher works in construction in Toronto and lives openly as a gay man. He has cut nearly all ties with the Afghan-Canadian community.

Still soft-spoken, with spiky highlighted brown hair and a slight frame, Zaher said he wrote the book to force Afghans to acknowledge that homosexuality exists in the country, and thousands suffer in silence.

“Their spirit has died,” Zaher said over tea at the Parkdale apartment of an Iranian-Canadian friend.

“They cannot dare to talk about this. They are like the moving dead, the living dead.”

Afghanistan isn’t the only conservative Muslim nation to persecute homosexuals. In Iran, a state-sponsored campaign has jailed, tortured and executed homosexuals, forcing many to seek asylum in the West. In Afghanistan, homosexuality is a crime, though gays aren’t hunted.

Zaher, who lived in exile in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey before arriving in Canada as a refugee, said Afghanistan’s antipathy to homosexuality is different than in Iran, where, despite persecution, a gay underground flourishes.

Not so in Afghanistan. To raise the issue, even in a private, is to invite ridicule and insults. Afghanistan’s brand of homophobia is more cultural than state-directed and, he argued, more insidious.

Even the democracy push fuelled by the U.S.-led coalition that ousted the Taliban has failed to help gay Afghans live safely out of the closet. Some argue that in the hierarchy of Afghan human rights issues, where violence against women and girls occurs daily, gay issues can’t find a footing.

In a grim paradox, Afghanistan’s extreme homophobia exists alongside a culture that tolerates the widespread sexual exploitation of Afghan boys.

Across Afghanistan, thousands of so-called bacha baz, meaning “boys for pleasure,” are routinely traded and sold for sex and entertainment by older, more powerful men. Some use the euphemism, “dancing boys,” because they are often dressed in female costumes and makeup to perform at weddings and private events.

The practice is against the law, but officials commonly turn a blind eye. Zaher said the men who use these boys for sex aren’t viewed as homosexual because the boys haven’t reached puberty.

“That’s for boasting,” Zaher said. “You’re proud of yourself. But if you say you’re homosexual, then you’re ridiculed.”

Zaher’s memoir is a searing, though rambling, account of a childhood spent in war, sexual confusion and fear. (Its title, It Is Your Enemy Who Is Dock-Tailed, will confuse Westerners. Dock-tailed is an Arabic expression for a man without a son or offspring.)

Like millions of Afghans of his generation, Zaher barely remembers a day of peace. He was born in 1974, five years before the Soviet invasion. His father, a military officer, was executed in 1979 for opposing President Hafizullah Amin. After that, Zaher’s widowed mother and six brothers and sisters lived in poverty.

At teenage dances, other boys ridiculed his movements, calling him a sissy or izak, which means hermaphrodite. Even as a youngster, Zaher noted with alarm that any Afghan man who lived an unconventional personal life faced public torment. As a 9-year-old, he watched a group of children hurl pebbles at an old, blind man on the street. His cousin told him it was because the old man never married.

It dawned on him that if he didn’t marry or have children he’d one day be in the old man’s shoes.

At age 19, on a trip to Islamabad, Pakistan, to visit his sister, he met a man in a park. They kissed and went to the man’s house for sex. Zaher never breathed a word. Back home in Afghanistan, he attempted sex with a woman to calculate if he could fathom marriage. The episode was a disaster and Zaher made plans to leave Afghanistan.

After years in Pakistan and Iran, Zaher moved to Turkey, where he applied to the United Nations for refugee status. His initial bid was rejected but Zaher won on appeal and moved to Canada in 2008.

The next year, he released the Farsi version of his memoir and sent copies to human rights organizations and media outlets in Afghanistan. In Canada, he introduced his manuscript at Afghan-Canadian literary events.

The reaction — in Canada and Afghanistan — was stony silence.

Zaher wasn’t surprised. “It’s a taboo,” he said. “It is risky to talk about it. In fact, those who commented on my book accepted a big risk.”

One of the few Afghan Canadians to acknowledge Zaher’s story was Maryam Mahboob, editor of the bi-weekly Zarnegaar, an Afghan-Canadian community newspaper. Mahboob gasped when she read some of Zaher’s tales. She wrote a column supporting the memoir.

“I said: ‘Read this book. This guy has a right to live like this. This guy is this way.’ When we talk about freedom and democracy, this democracy, it belongs to everyone who lives, here and in Afghanistan.”

The reaction to Mahboob’s column: more silence. She said Zaher will face an uphill battle even in Canada. “The majority of Afghan-Canadians, they don’t like to talk to him,” Mahboob said. “He’s like, dirty.”

Zaher hoped his book would have sparked a debate in Afghanistan. Earlier this month, the BBC service in Afghanistan picked up the story. The reporter who wrote the story contacted several Kabul-based human rights groups for comment, but no group would touch the issue.

Zaher said writing the memoir allowed him to vent years of anger and confusion. Now, he wants to move on. He’d like to return to school, perhaps to finish the pharmacy studies he began in Kabul.

He doesn’t miss Afghanistan or dream of returning to his homeland. “I only have nightmares about Afghanistan.”

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